Children of the Dictatorship

Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the 'Long 1960s' in Greece

Kostis Kornetis

• Editore: Berghahn Books
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781782380016
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: European History

Putting Greece back on the cultural and political map of the "Long 1960s, " this book traces the dissent and activism of anti-regime students during the dictatorship of the Colonels (1967-74). It explores the cultural as well as ideological protest of Greek student activists, illustrating how these "children of the dictatorship" managed to re-appropriate indigenous folk tradition for their "progressive" purposes and how their transnational exchange molded a particular local protest culture. It examines how the students' social and political practices became a major source of pressure on the Colonels' regime, finding its apogee in the three day Polytechnic uprising of November 1973 which laid the foundations for a total reshaping of Greek political culture in the following decades.

Chapter 1

A Changing Society

This chapter aims to reconstruct the conditions of the university and the country prior to the Junta. By looking at the period leading up to the dictatorship, it attempts to trace the identity of those students of the mid-1960s, some of whom were the first to experience the impact of authoritarianism in 1967. The pre-Junta period is inextricably linked to the actual dictatorship years in terms of continuities and ruptures, and is crucial for providing an understanding of the context and the evolution of the social actors concerned. The chapter focuses on Generation Z, an age-group that was shaped by the civil war and post–civil war experiences, and in particular the political assassination of left-wing MP Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963.

Greece in the 1960s

The Communist defeat in the Greek Civil War (ca. 1944–1949) by the National Army, with the initial aid of Great Britain and the subsequent decisive intervention of the United States, produced a deeply divided society in its wake. Even though schisms were not something new for Greek society and politics—ever since World War I a major cleavage existed between royalists and republicans—this time the armed nature of the civil conflict led to the creation of a semi-apartheid system for the defeated, entirely lacerating the social fabric. Over 100,000 people had to leave Greece for the countries of the Eastern Bloc. Communists and sympathizers were treated as internal enemies or, as anthropologist Neni Panourgiá aptly put it, “dangerous citizens.”¹ Up until the mid-1960s thousands of left-wingers and “fellow-travelers” were interned in remote islands for reeducation purposes. “National-mindedness” (ethnikofrosyni) became the official state ideology, in juxtaposition to the supposed unpatriotic Left.² The extreme communistophobia that prevailed must be understood in the context not only of the long-lasting legacy of the Greek Civil War but also of the Cold War itself.

Still, despite the deleterious effects of the aftermath of the civil conflict, Greece experienced some improvements in the early 1960s both in terms of democratization and modernization.³ The United Democratic Left (EDA), a political party that gathered the heritage of the communist-led wartime resistance and advocated for democratization after the civil war, gradually became a significant political player starting with a spectacular electoral result in 1958.⁴ More importantly, the first non-right-wing governments since the early 1950s led by George Papandreou’s Center Union (EK) from late 1963 to mid-1965 introduced some liberalization, including the softening of anticommunist legislation, the gradual closing down of internment camps and the first repatriations of exiled communists from the Eastern Bloc. Despite this liberalization, however, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) continued to be banned under Law 509 of 1947 on the implementation and circulation of ideas aiming at the overthrow of the political system.

Nonetheless, Greece’s incomplete democracy and the remnants of the civil conflict—very apparent after the summer of 1965 when the prime minister came into an open conflict with the king, causing a constitutional crisis and a parliamentary turmoil that lasted for about two years—managed to establish the groundwork for the arrival of the Colonels in 1967. Moreover, even despite Papandreou’s introduction of a limited liberalization, in reality the post–civil war status quo of curtailed democratic rights and limited social expression extended up to 1974: it was only after the collapse of the Colonels and the restoration of democracy in 1974 that the long-lasting post–civil war era came to a close, at least on an institutional level, with the decriminalization of communism and the rehabilitation of the exiled and imprisoned left-wingers. Novelist Alexandros Kotzias’s term “The Greek Thirty Years’ War,” coined in order to describe this entire period of extreme polarization, is quite accurate.⁵

In structural terms, the country was still suffering from economic underdevelopment and social backwardness. Its socioeconomic outlook was comprised of a dominant peasantry, a relatively weak working class, a large petty bourgeoisie, an oligarchy of compradors, and a small-scale commodity-type production, coupled with delayed industrialization. There was a postwar economic boom that was facilitated by foreign investment, but its effects were to be fully experienced relatively late in Greece in comparison with the Western European countries. In the late 1950s, despite skyrocketing industrial production and US capital investments in exchange for military presence,⁶ the desperate need for jobs led to a considerable export of labor, mainly to West Germany and to a lesser extent to Belgium. Greeks were among the most numerous “guest workers.”

At the same time, Greece was changing rapidly in the long 1960s and moving toward modernization. The unprecedented urbanization and social dislocation that the country experienced in the post–civil war era was accompanied by a complete reconfiguration of the urban landscape.⁷ This period also witnessed a rapid increase in US imported consumer culture, enabled by the “economic miracle” of the 1950s. Modern electronic devices and cars—luxuries a decade earlier—had become normal commodities by the early 1960s.⁸ While large segments of the urban population joined the expanding public sector workforce, the establishment of a welfare state became an expressed aim of both the right-wing government of Constantine Karamanlis (1955–1963) and the centrist ones of George Papandreou (1963–1965). Although welfare was never fully achieved, its anticipation increased the expectations of a better future, while the introduction of more consumer goods was supposed to make Greeks pay less attention to politics. Prosperity and mass consumption, however, two of the main features of postwar Western Europe, were not consolidated prior to the Colonels’ dictatorship. In contrast to their counterparts in other Western European nations, Greek youth of the 1960s spent their teen years without television, as this medium was purchased en masse only in the following decade.⁹ By the early 1970s, televisions and stereos, major sources of mass culture in the Western world, had already become standard necessities, their purchase having been made possible by payments in installments.

Another interesting change regarding not only the Greek economy but the society as a whole is the fact that the country started becoming a tourist destination in the 1960s. Partly thanks to major blockbusters such as Jules Dassin’s Never on Sunday (1960) and Michael Cacoyannis’s Zorba the Greek (1964), Greece and its islands were becoming touristic attractions. But again, it was during the years of the dictatorship when the country’s tourism really took off. Whereas Greece received 394,000 tourists in 1960, the number of tourists entering the country totaled 2.5 million in 1972,¹⁰ which coincided with the development of commercial air travel. Apart from high-class tourism and as was the case with Ibiza in Spain at about the same time, several Greek islands, including Crete, Mykonos, and Samothrace, became hippie “headquarters,” where liberal habits in terms of clothing and sexual behavior were openly pursued. This upset both the regime’s moral standards and the traditional local societies of the time—bringing them, however, in direct contact with the outside world.

Universities between Progression and Regression

What was the situation in the Greek universities in the “long 1960s”? Similar to other European countries, by 1967, Greek universities had witnessed an unprecedented increase in student numbers that began in the early 1960s, mainly due to the demographic boom of the postwar years and the post-civil war era that led to a rising concentration of youth in big cities. These phenomena enhanced the perception of the youth as a separate social category. Altered demographics boosted the youths’ “awareness of constituting a distinct community with particular interests.”¹¹

Figure 1.1. Change in Student Numbers in Greek Institutions of Higher Education, 1960–1973. (Source: ESIE)

Rising production needs created a demand for specialized technocratic personnel who could take up careers in the rapidly expanding public sector. The student population almost tripled from 28,302 in 1960–1961 to 80,041 in 1973. In order to cope with these changes, more student places were created, including a university in Ioannina and another later on in Patras.¹² The greatest increase in student numbers occurred in the years 1963–1965, when the student population grew from 35,000 to 53,300 (figure 1.1).¹³ This shift was facilitated by the educational reform carried out by the liberal EK government that came to power in 1963, whose intellectual guru was pedagogue Evangelos Papanoutsos. The reform removed several social obstacles to entering higher education, the most important of which was tuition fees. It also initiated the National High School Diploma (Ethnikon Apolytirion), an examination of students by blind peer review that bypassed personal relations and favoritism, enabling gifted students from the countryside to study for a degree.

The same reform gave a progressive push to Greek education for the first time since the end of the civil war. It significantly reduced ideological propaganda in school curricula and favored the use of the vernacular Greek (dimotiki) over the artificial, purified version (katharevousa) that had been constantly promoted by the Greek state until then. More importantly, the Center Union government under Papandreou abolished the certificate of civic mindedness (pistopoiitikon koinonikon fronimaton).¹⁴ This was a document issued by the police regarding a citizen’s political affiliation, meant to stigmatize “unpatriotic” left-wingers and exclude them from all public jobs, aid, scholarships, and professional permits.¹⁵ The certificates had been a university entrance requirement ever since the end of the civil war whose legacy was clearly a long-lasting one.

By 1968–1969, 71,259 students were enrolled in institutions of higher education: 48,758 men and 22,501 women. Women had begun entering the universities in larger numbers only in the mid-1960s as a result of more flexible family strategies and the enhanced possibility of entering the job market on favorable terms as graduates. Approximately one-third of all students came from the two large urban centers (25,460 from Athens and 6,944 from Salonica), while the rest were from the provinces.¹⁶ Naturally, students from the countryside had more freedom of action than those living with their parents, though they came to university less politicized. In their recollections, these students stress the differences between themselves and the city kids. One emphasized the effects of these cultural differences: “I used to be, you know, the kid from the provinces, and I felt like a bit of a bumpkin. Naturally, it took me a while to demythologize some of my fellow students who were very nicely dressed, who were from Athens and had a different attitude” (Mavragani,...